Nick Leeson

For a while, he was the kid from nowhere whose Midas touch made millions for his patrician overlords. Then, when it all turned sour, he was the Rogue Trader whose breath-stopping losses epitomized the dizzy excesses of the markets in the mid-1990s. And Saturday, as Nick Leeson, 32, was set to fly back to Britain after almost four years in a Singapore jail, the former trader who brought down Britain's oldest merchant bank faced a bittersweet homecoming - his assets reportedly frozen, his future unclear and his freedom flawed by the same question as undid him: What happened to the money?

What is big and square and could eat up as much desk space as an old computer monitor? The "desk apprentice," the brainchild of one of the teams from the NBC-TV show, The Apprentice, where flamboyant developer Donald Trump sets MBAs and executive wannabes to various tasks and fires one of them at show's end. The organizer -- basically a basilica-shaped black cube with vertical slots on a lazy Susan base -- was unveiled in last week's episode. Taking up more than a square foot of desk space, it was the culmination of the teams' efforts to create something to help The Donald organize his messy desk.

What is big and square and could eat up as much desk space as an old computer monitor? The "desk apprentice," the brainchild of one of the teams from the NBC-TV show, The Apprentice, where flamboyant developer Donald Trump sets MBAs and executive wannabes to various tasks and fires one of them at show's end. The organizer -- basically a basilica-shaped black cube with vertical slots on a lazy Susan base -- was unveiled in last week's episode. Taking up more than a square foot of desk space, it was the culmination of the teams' efforts to create something to help The Donald organize his messy desk.

For a while, he was the kid from nowhere whose Midas touch made millions for his patrician overlords. Then, when it all turned sour, he was the Rogue Trader whose breath-stopping losses epitomized the dizzy excesses of the markets in the mid-1990s. And Saturday, as Nick Leeson, 32, was set to fly back to Britain after almost four years in a Singapore jail, the former trader who brought down Britain's oldest merchant bank faced a bittersweet homecoming - his assets reportedly frozen, his future unclear and his freedom flawed by the same question as undid him: What happened to the money?

It generally is not a good sign when a movie goes directly to video or directly to cable. It's like a book that goes directly to the dollar bin. Rogue Trader has an additional stigma. Not only is it going directly to cable, it is going directly to second-tier cable -- HBO's little sister Cinemax. This is especially revealing inasmuch as June is the first month in memory without an HBO original movie. Apparently Rogue Trader was not considered to be better than nothing. This might be a bit harsh.

A high-flying Austrian securities trader has formed an investment group that has bid for Advanced Promotion Technologies, a money-losing Pompano Beach company with a promising new supermarket marketing system. Wolfgang Flottl, 39, has formed APT Acquisition Corp. in order to bid $4.50 in cash and notes for the company. The offer also includes a $25 million cash infusion. Advanced Promotion's stock closed on Monday at 3 3/16, up 5/16 over Friday. Advanced Promotion said it was studying the offer.

Nick Leeson and Barings Bank have become, respectively, the poster child and poster company for bad decision-making. Leeson was the trader whose attempts beginning in 1992 to cover up trading mistakes and losses mushroomed into a billion-dollar loss and the collapse of the bank. How did it happen? The answer to this question suggests the critical steps in a bad decision-making process and points the way toward making better decisions. Stephen J. Hoch and Howard C. Kunreuther, professors at the Wharton School of Business and editors of Wharton on Making Decisions, identify several additional mistakes that Barings' managers made and to which we are all prone.

In Singapore last year, 27-year-old Nick Leeson was fined $140 for indecently exposing himself before a group of women in a discotheque. But when he was running up $27 billion in financial-derivative trades that bankrupted a venerable merchant bank, what did the see-no-evil regulators of Simex, Singapore's swinging stock exchange, do? They shyly looked the other way. "It would be much harder, nearly impossible, to work that kind of conspiracy in New York than in Singapore," says David Shulman, chief equity strategist at Salomon Brothers.

A spokeswoman for Elizabeth Hurley branded as "completely ridiculous" the buzz that she has a new beau. Hugh Grant is still it for the Estee Lauder face, said a London spokeswoman, Karen Smith. The New York Post, citing sources it didn't identify, said Monday that Hollywood's community of Brits is atwitter over a romance between Hurley and Lord John Somerset, 33, son of the duke of Beaufort. Somerset, a free-lance record producer, separated from his wife, Cosima, after six years of marriage, the Post reported.

One of Japan's largest banks, Daiwa Bank Ltd., said it lost $1.1 billion stemming from a New York executive's 11-year attempt to hide a $200,000 loss he suffered more than a decade ago. The world's 19th-largest bank blamed its loss on 44-year-old Toshihide Iguchi, an executive vice president, who was charged with fraud in U.S. District Court on Tuesday. The U.S. Justice Department said Iguchi engaged in a "wide pattern of illegal conduct in connection with his activities at the bank."The trader, who was arrested by the FBI on Saturday, was accused of falsifying Daiwa's books and records - charges punishable by up to 30 years in jail and $1 million in fines.

It generally is not a good sign when a movie goes directly to video or directly to cable. It's like a book that goes directly to the dollar bin. Rogue Trader has an additional stigma. Not only is it going directly to cable, it is going directly to second-tier cable -- HBO's little sister Cinemax. This is especially revealing inasmuch as June is the first month in memory without an HBO original movie. Apparently Rogue Trader was not considered to be better than nothing. This might be a bit harsh.